The “Oddly Satisfying” Pleasures of Slime Porn

The videos seem to come from nowhere, delivered to the grid of my Instagram Explore tab under the subhead “Oddly Satisfying.” They appear to lack a unifying trait, beyond the strange yield of odd satisfaction. Like porn, you just tend to know it when you see it. The plots are both practical and idiosyncratic: a hydraulic press crushing a superhot ball; a palette knife incorporating two shades of paint; a rag applying mineral oil to a bowl. The soundtrack is usually just ambient noise, or sometimes a genre I’d call elevator techno. The feeling of watching is sensual, if not erotic—akin to the pleasure of extracting a blackhead, or plunging your hand into a tub of uncooked rice. It’s a cousin of the reflex that psychologists call frisson—the sudden eruption of goosebumps on the skin as a piece of music shifts into a different, higher key. Top videos can draw at least a hundred thousand views.

“Oddly Satisfying” videos bear a resemblance to another niche genre, in which women perform mundane tasks, like whispering instructions or crinkling paper. While those clips are meant to trigger a fizzy kind of shiver, known to the afflicted as ASMR, “Oddly Satisfying” ones are less visceral and more tactile, giving priority to sights over sounds. The primary motif of the genre is slime—a variable mixture made from Elmer’s white glue and a range of household substances from borax to starch. The slime videos tend to begin with hands—young, pretty hands, with piano-player fingers—prodding the surface of whatever goo in question. These different homemade mixtures exhibit different behaviors: a doughier slime will shrink back on itself, only fleetingly changed by the probe of a finger. The glossier slimes hold their shapes, remembering the half-moon impression of a nail. The most distinctive type of slime is a subspecies called floam, thickened by a spoonful of Styrofoam pellets. Manipulated floam sounds like a crackling fire or the snapping of bubble gum tuned to a high pitch. The action of the hands looks similar to work but is more nonsensical and less productive: the hands mold the slime into a heart-shaped cake, then roll through its center with a pizza-cutting wheel. The hands cup the slime into a conical mound, then flatten the pile with the bulb end of a ladle. Discovering each new peculiar routine is almost as satisfying as the footage itself.

In watching over time, I’ve refined my predilections. A video of a melon baller carving perfect spheres sent my shoulder blades relaxing, slime-like, down my back. I cringed as a pair of disembodied hands sliced a dough-filled balloon in half with scissors. And yet unlike other viral oddities, “Oddly Satisfying” clips lack the punch line that might lead a viewer to share them with friends. Consuming them feels like a private behavior, a rare antisocial form of delight. They’re perfect for watching alone at bedtime, a proxy for kneading the brain itself to sleep. Lately, some of the more popular accounts have taken to selling their own homemade slimes. I’ve never felt moved to buy any for myself. Like many of the pleasures of online life, the appeal of the videos is found in having the texture of the real world flattened by the distance of a digital screen. Actual slime seems far too messy.